Surprised by "Surprised by God..."

Recently a visit to Kolbo netted me a bag full of books, including Surprised by God: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, by Danya Ruttenberg. I was initially drawn to the book by its intriguing blurb and the cover photograph of a young woman fearlessly wearing her Kippah as she headed down a busy street, conspicuously facing oncoming traffic. Her back is to the reader, leaving an impression of taking the first step of a thousand-mile journey. Her rebelliousness made me smile. I wasn’t quite sure where she was going but, for a couple of a hundred pages at least, was willing to be led.


I was also drawn by the book’s subtitle: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion." This so echoed my own skittishness regarding organized religion, which I used to see (*as the author also mentions, I believe) as a gateway drug to spirit-breaking soul-surrendering fundamentalist abdication of common sense and reason. Go to Shabbat services and come out a fundamentalist zombie. Sit in on Torah study and come out embracing religious intolerance and justified racism, Creationism, and stoning of women and wayward children.

That this book would touch upon this fear, amongst others, speaks to a candid authorial fearlessness that for me kept the pages turning. With an easy if not graceful, catching-up-with-your-BBF, tone she writes how various life incidences - including the painful death of a close family member - shook her down to her foundation and in turn opened her up to universal aspects and needs of humanity that were larger than she. The conduit between these two planes of consciousness, was her discarded, although not entirely forgotten, Judaism

That these incidences gave her more than a moment’s pause, especially in trying to figure out just where they were all leading her, and what her close friends might say, think and ultimately act, resonates with me. Although not a convert to Judaism, Rabbi Ruttenberg’s spiritual journey from hardened teenage cynic to emotionally crushed daughter and tentative follower through to rabbinical awakening, parallels and intersects some of my experiences of conversion. Whether it was coming out as queer, trans or as a fledgling Jew, I have always wondered just where my paths of (re)discovery were taking me, and just what and who I would have to leave behind along the way. I too had (and continue to have) feelings of stepping into an ancient current much larger than myself and that the only way to let said slipstream carry me away to where I needed to go was to let go of my overinflated Self.

What I also enjoyed were her insights about the nature of religion that needs to relate to a greater Cosmos however we may describe it. Drawing upon a number of sources from different world religions she plumbs some very heady depths...not in search of Truth (whatever that might be) but of her own truth, her place in the Universe.

For the convert, for the spiritual, for the philosopher or for the reader of sojourns that head down the road less taken, I could not recommend this book more.